Korea Zinc wins the grand prize at the 2026 Safety Experience Training Center Best Practices Competition. [Korea Zinc]
Korea Zinc wins the grand prize at the 2026 Safety Experience Training Center Best Practices Competition. [Korea Zinc]

Korea Zinc's Onsan smelter announced Monday that it won the grand prize at the 2026 Safety Experience Training Center Best Practices Competition, hosted by the Ministry of Employment and Labor and organized by the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency.

The competition was held at Kintex in Ilsan, Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, as a side event of the 2026 Industrial Safety and Health Month. It was organized to identify innovative and outstanding experiential training practices from privately run safety training centers accredited by the agency and to share those practices across industrial worksites.

The Onsan smelter earned high marks for its detailed presentation on how it built its safety experience training center — incorporating the smelter's actual work environment and accident cases — along with its operational results and a field-centered safety training system for its own employees and partner company staff.

To address the limitations of conventional lecture-based training and sharpen workers' hazard awareness and emergency response skills, the Onsan smelter began building experiential training facilities in phases starting in 2023. It continued expanding the facilities and content, opening a dedicated safety experience training center last year and earning official accreditation from the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency.

The center spans six training zones — covering protective equipment, plant operations, construction, fire and emergency response, and two additional areas — and is equipped with 39 types of hands-on training installations. Trainees can directly experience major hazards that can occur on site, including chemical spills, confined spaces, conveyor entrapment, crane lifting, floor-opening falls, scaffolding work, and firefighting and evacuation.

The center is designed so that training goes beyond memorizing safety rules and translates into real safety behavior through hands-on practice. Going forward, the smelter plans to further strengthen experience-based safety training for both its own employees and partner company staff, while gradually expanding the program to affiliates, neighboring companies and related organizations.

"This award reflects our efforts to move safety training beyond simple knowledge transfer and connect it to changes in worker behavior and improved on-site response capabilities," said Kim Seung-hyeon, head of Korea Zinc's Onsan smelter. "We will continue to faithfully incorporate the actual work environment and on-site voices into our training to steadily strengthen the safety capabilities of our employees and partner companies."

Meanwhile, the Onsan smelter has been carrying out a range of corporate social responsibility activities, including a recent donation of 2.9 metric tons of white rice — 143 bags of 20 kilograms each — worth 10 million won ($6,740) to the Ulju Southern Senior Welfare Center.


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